Product design and development is a complex process which encompasses a wide variety of tasks that may require from several days to several years. Product development may span from identifying a need for a product to designing, testing, and obtaining approvals from governmental and/or regulatory authorities, to the manufacturing, promoting, and selling of the product. One of the most important steps in the product development process is to communicate product, package, material, and process design requirements to the internal and/or external supply chain for implementation. The use of computers to organize information and communicate with various departments within and among organizations has provided some improvement in the efficiency of the product development process. However, wide-spread implementation of integrated software-based tools has yet to be utilized, particularly within government regulated industries which require validation.
Communication of various information, such as product specifications, packaging, material and process design requirements, is often done by various groups or departments within an organization, at various times during the development, with the hope and intent that the final product elements converge flawlessly. Historically, this information has been specified in various text documents sometimes referred to as technical standards. To fully capture the technical, regulatory, safety, and various other design requirements for a given product may require between five and fifteen different documents, for example, depending upon the particular business and industry.
A number of systems have been developed to manage technical data within a supply chain environment. These systems are often used for planning, procurement, manufacture, and inventory management. While these systems may be useful in a production environment, they do not typically provide the flexibility required for use in a product development environment. Nor do they adequately integrate with product development and other enterprise systems to share information without data re-entry.
Various product design management (PDM) systems have been used to describe product elements. However, these systems tend to be useful in a narrow product field or development function, and too complex for users other than full time designers. Furthermore, these systems do not combine or manage the product, package, material, testing, regulatory, safety, and other information into a single tool. As such, these systems are unsuitable for use in a broad global enterprise having multiple diverse businesses.
Work process systems have been developed to aid with scheduling the product development process. However, these systems generally focus on project milestones, not on the actual technical content of product, package, process, and material requirements. Likewise, a number of supply chain enterprise management tools are available but are not suitable for use in the product development environment in that they are too inflexible and user unfriendly.
Existing systems which use computers to electronically manage product development information (such as technical standards) are simply filing systems for electronic versions of text documents. One problem with text-based systems is that data entered in these systems must be re-entered in other systems numerous times during the product development process and supply chain implementation. Differences in technical content and in data standards ensures such data rework will occur. Identical or related data may be entered for experimental work, consumer test clearance, plant test planning, safety assessment, material test documentation, production technical standards, supplier analysis certificates, environmental constituent tracking, and the like. Cross-checking of various elements of a completed product to ensure overall consistency and quality is therefore difficult. It is desirable to provide system checks across products, packages, materials, and test methods to ensure each is suited for a particular geographic area in terms of regulatory, safety, and legal requirements, for example.
In a large enterprise, global alignment of content and usage for text-based systems is difficult or impossible. Such alignment is important to avoid redundant data entry wherever work crosses organization or geographic boundaries. For example, different businesses and geographic regions may assign different responsibilities for the creation, approval, and use of technical standard type data. As such, content managed by one group as part of a package might be managed by another group as part of a product or a process. Alternatively, one business may complete certain tasks in product development while another business may delegate those tasks to the supply chain, for example.